I. Picture-thinking and God in Hegel’s thought

What is God for Hegel? In the Science of Logic, Hegel defines actual reality (Wirklichkeit) as follows: ‘What is actually real [wirklich] can act; something announces its real actuality by what it produces’ (SL: 482/6: 208).Footnote ¹ Can God be said to be real according to this definition? A first relevant issue here is the definition of the realm to which such a definition can apply. In other words, is Hegel primarily interested in what God is and what He ‘produces’ in His objective reality—thus reconnecting with the traditional theistic tradition that sought to prove the reality of God—or in how we think about God—by diagnosing, for instance, a change in our way of thinking about God in modernity?

The question of God is clearly central to an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy, because it is bound to influence countless other notions that he uses. Moreover, in the context of his philosophy of religion, Hegel uses several terms and notions that derive from Christian theology, such as the incarnation, the Trinity, and the death of God. Here, therefore, the question is whether Hegel is using them metaphorically, as images inadequately anticipating a philosophical content, or as having objective content in themselves.

It is not possible here to provide even the briefest survey of the reception of Hegel’s thought on religion. For the purpose of this paper, I will therefore limit the analysis to the recent debate in Anglophone Hegel scholarship. This debate, although focused on the general interpretation of Hegel’s idealism, in fact has important repercussions for Hegel’s conception of God. In the context of this debate, answers range from views that the main purpose of Hegel’s system is to articulate a metaphysical account of the world and of history—call it the ‘conceptual realist’ interpretation—to ‘revisionist’—also referred to as ‘deflationary’—readings, which largely question the metaphysical nature of Hegel’s system.

The ‘conceptual realist’ interpretation reads Hegel’s idealism as an inquiry into fundamental ‘features’ or ‘structures’ of the world itself, which include a conceptual dimension, thus rejecting any transcendental interpretation of Hegel (see Stern Reference Stern2002, Reference Stern2009; Westphal Reference Westphal2003; Kreines Reference Kreines2006, Reference Kreines2007, Reference Kreines2008).Footnote ² Conversely, the ‘post-Kantian’ or ‘revisionist’ interpretation (Pippin Reference Pippin1989, Reference Pippin1999; Pinkard Reference Pinkard1994, Reference Pinkard2002) considers Hegel’s thought to be an extension of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, with the conditions of human rationality not limited to mental formal structures but rather including historically and socially determined conditions. To complete this brief taxonomy of recent approaches to Hegel, one should add the ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation, which regards Hegel’s philosophy as a distinctive type of post-Kantian metaphysics, insofar as ‘metaphysics after Kant is a science of being as being thought’ (Longuenesse Reference Longuenesse2007: xvii).Footnote ³

Both the conceptual realist and the post-Kantian/revisionist readings of Hegel seem to offer a de-theologized version of Hegel (cf. Williams Reference Williams2012: 18). They either, with Beiser (Reference Beiser2005: 145), regard Christian religious representations as ‘simply metaphors, intuitions and feelings about this fundamental truth of reason’,Footnote ⁴ or argue, with Pinkard (Reference Pinkard2000: 219), that in Hegel’s view, ‘The divine in Christianity is the rational structure of the whole in which we live and work, are born and die, not some transcendent entity beyond human life and concerns’. In the ‘qualified revisionist’ field, Longuenesse recognizes the presence of metaphysical-theological elements in Hegel’s idealism but seems reluctant to embrace them; Redding (Reference Redding2009: 60) regards the mind of Hegel’s God as distributed across the minds of finite human beings, and yet he argues that this does not ‘disqualify it from being a mind in its own right, nor does this reduce it to the status of a mere fiction’.Footnote ⁵

In this paper, I advocate a ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, and I introduce a further qualification that it is, in my view, important to clarify what God is for Hegel and the status of religious notions in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. This qualification is an interpretation of the objective reality that Hegel wants for God as mediated objectivity. I also argue that the conception of mediated objectivity allows a better understanding of the status of religious notions in Hegel’s philosophy of religion via a figural reading of religious representations. To illustrate how such a suggested reading works, I use Auerbach’s figural hermeneutics as a broad conceptual framework.

I will address the idea of mediated objectivity and the figural reading in the second and third sections, respectively. Before proceeding further, however, it is first appropriate to establish the terms of the question by briefly considering the nature of religion, the role of Christianity, and the kind of problem that an interpretation of religious (Christian) representations posits in the context of Hegel’s philosophy of religion. I will accomplish this by referring to definitions provided in the existing scholarship, which I take to be (relatively) undisputed, and building on them to pave the way for the ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation that I introduce in the next section.

According to Magee (Reference Magee2010: 189), religion for Hegel is ‘the truth grasped in picture-thinking’ (das vorstellende Denken). Hegel’s analysis of religion is indeed characterized by a frequent use of the term Vorstellung. This term is usually translated into English as ‘representation’Footnote ⁶ and is, according to Williams’s definition (Reference Williams1992a: 257), ‘consciousness as a representational system’ that ‘is based upon and constituted by the dichotomy between subject and object’. The content of religion is the same as that of philosophy, but its form is not properly conceptual (JS–III: 181/260): Vorstellungen are representations of objects perceived to be external by consciousness. In fact, in religion, God is often conceived as a Gegenstand, an object-that-stands-over-and-against human consciousness: that is, God is represented ‘without proper consideration of its relation’ to the human subject (Adams Reference Adams2013: 84). Such opposition has to be overcome: God is to be thought of as being in indissoluble relation with the human consciousness. As an implication, the human subject cannot properly think of God outside the set of historical and cultural categories that have determined His representation. I take this to be the general strategy employed in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which effectively represent an analysis of the transformations of religious Vorstellungen through the various ages and cultures. The question of what God is for Hegel, therefore, inevitably implies a question as to whether Hegel is suggesting that we should consider all the representational accounts of God to be vestiges of the past which are destined to be overcome by a pure conceptual understanding of God (similarly to what other philosophers had suggested before Hegel). As I am going to argue, Hegel’s understanding of the relation between the representation(s) of God and the concept of God is actually much more sophisticated than that.

Historically, in the Western world, the traditional philosophical conception of God derived from the Aristotelian idea of the immutable and impassive ‘unmoved mover’, which also represented the ‘view from nowhere’ typical of traditional metaphysics. In modernity, the philosophical idea of God was made to coincide with the source of norms, that is, the source of a normativity that transcends the acts of individuals. Against this background Christianity represents, in Hegel’s view, a ‘complete revolution’ (Rel III: 127–29/62–65): ‘substance becomes subject’ (PG: 476/3: 571). This claim appears after Hegel’s account of the incarnation, which represents the death of the ancient (Aristotelian) God, that is, God as substance. There is no doubt that Hegel has Aristotle in mind here, and the Aristotelian definition of God as ‘thought thinking itself’. The Aristotelian God, as well as Spinoza’s God, which is also defined as substance, is not a person or a subject (cf. Inwood Reference Inwood1992: 286). Christianity captures an aspect of God that is missing in both the Aristotelian and the Spinozistic accounts: God is a person, that is, a subject. Christianity represents this move through the emphasis on the self-divestment (Entäusserung) that occurs in the incarnation and death of Christ. That is, God is not immobile, static, and motionless but is rather active and self-transforming, alive.

The revolution of Christianity calls for a reconceptualization of God because it introduces, with the notion of incarnation, the conception of a God who assumes the finite viewpoint and renounces his absoluteness to the point of death. Hegel’s great insight here is to understand that, although God does play a fundamental philosophical role, He cannot be thought of in isolation from the historical and cultural transformations of the conception of the divine, because God needs to be thought of in conjunction with the movements of the self-consciousness that is thinking God. Whether the Christian God to which Hegel refers is a more-or-less orthodox Lutheran God or, more likely, a heterodox God whose conception is influenced by the mystical tradition of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme,Footnote ⁷ two considerations are relevant for our purpose. First, in the context of a philosophical analysis of religion, representations and concepts must be conceived in mutual relation; religious representations lead to philosophical concepts, and the corresponding concepts reconstruct ‘the genetic move that made it [the concept] possible’—a strategy that O’Regan calls, with an appropriate expression, ‘a special kind of dialectical shuttle’ (O’Regan Reference O’Regan1994: 360). Second, Hegel’s endorsement of a kenotic conception of God—a God undergoing self-divestment—is, as noted by Williams (Reference Williams1992b: 53), ‘unfoundational’. Hegel’s discourse on God, I argue, can be defined as ‘unfoundational’ in a twofold sense: first, because there is no onto-theological necessity guiding this process; and second, because the process cannot occur outside of the relation between God and humanity. Williams particularly focuses on the theological justification for this unfoundational discourse.Footnote ⁸ Here, I am interested in developing the philosophical justification for such unfoundational discourse. In fact, if the central question is, as stated above, whether Hegel considers God and the objects of other religious notions to have objective content in themselves (and not merely as images inadequately anticipating a philosophical content), then we should wonder whether rational philosophical thought can effectively support a conception of God that entails an objective (that is, not merely metaphorical) understanding of religious representations without being foundationalist—in a pre-Kantian and traditionally theistic sense.

Prima facie, the question seems to be whether the religious representations and particularly the conception of the Christian incarnated God (which clearly plays a pivotal role in Hegel’s conception of the ‘consummate’ religion) merely belong to the history of thought and culture (that is, they are relevant insofar as they are meaningful to understand a change that occurred in our way of thinking about God) or whether they have an ontic status, that is, whether the incarnation, death, and resurrection are events that effectively occurred to a being distinct from us, which we refer to as ‘God’. Put in these terms, the distinction is between an anthropological reading and a realist reading of Hegel’s conception of God—in other words, it is a more sophisticated version of the old split between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Hegelians.

As already noted by some interpreters,Footnote ⁹ the answer to this question has ramifications for the broader interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics. In fact, what is at stake here is the understanding of Hegel’s idealism and the extent to which it maintains—and possibly extends—the Kantian Copernican revolution while restoring non-subjective content to philosophy—as well as to religion.

II. The ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation of Hegel and mediated objectivity

In the previous section, I briefly referred to the recent debate between the ‘conceptual realist’ and the ‘revisionist post-Kantian’ interpretations of Hegel’s metaphysics. Such approaches often differ in their interpretation of Hegel’s attitude towards the possibility of a post-Kantian metaphysics. The ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation then offers a further contribution to such a debate. The basic tenet of the ‘qualified revisionist’ interpretation can be identified, I maintain, in Longuenesse’s claim that ‘metaphysics after Kant is a science of being as being thought’ (Reference Longuenesse2007: xvii). The qualified revisionist approach, I suggest, potentially provides an interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics within which the question of the objective reality of God for Hegel can be answered. For the qualified revisionist approach also to provide a philosophical justification for Hegel’s conception of God and religious representations as objective and yet not foundationalist (in the sense of pre-Kantian metaphysics), we need, I contend, to introduce a further qualification, which I call the ‘mediated objectivity’ of metaphysical knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰ In the remaining part of this section, I will argue that the objective reality that Hegel attributes to God in particular and for religious representations in general, considered as metaphysical objects, is a mediated objectivity. That is, this is an objectivity that does not reflect the reality of an object which-stands-over-against the human consciousness, but rather that takes into account the contribution of our self-conscious mind for the establishment of the content of that metaphysical object, and thus reflects the relational unity between subject and object.

Hegel clearly maintains, and this is indeed something that is hard to deny, that Western philosophy started from a realist metaphysical view—that is, the view that knowledge requires the subject’s cognition to conform to the object. Kant’s critical philosophy has jeopardized this view, which was destined to collapse, according to Hegel. However, the collapse of traditional metaphysical realism led to the rise of subjectivism. Traditional realism and subjectivism generate two conceptions of God, and religion in general, that are mutually exclusive: either God exists as a mind-independent external object—realism—or God is a concept completely dependent on our subjective activity—subjectivism, which pushed to its extreme consequences can turn into fictionalism. What both traditional realism and subjectivism—including Kant’s idealism, insofar as it is not immune to a variety of subjectivism—fail to recognize is that self-consciousness itself, that is, the standpoint from which the world and God are approached, ‘exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, exists only in being acknowledged’ (PG: 111/3: 145).

The consideration of self-consciousness as dependent on recognition sheds some light on the extent to which Hegel’s idealism can be considered transcendental. Hegel scolds Kant for resigning himself to a world of appearances. However, Hegel’s reproach can be considered to be consistent with what he takes to be the spirit of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, that is, the idea that our cognition is not passively modelled on the external world; our self-conscious mind contributes something to it. For Kant, the contribution was only formal: our mind contributes the form of knowledge, whereas the content comes exclusively from the empirical world. However, limiting the contribution of the mind to the form of knowledge still reproduces, to some degree, the traditional metaphysical distinction between subject and object, splitting the object into an accessible (phenomenon) and an inaccessible (noumenon) aspect and thus paving the way to subjectivism. Being radical in the conception that our cognition is not passively modelled on the external world means affirming, with Hegel, that our mind contributes not only the form of knowledge but also some of its content; for there is, properly speaking, no ‘metaphysical’ world prior to self-consciousness and no self-consciousness prior to recognition.

This is what I take to be the transcendental dimension that is maintained in Hegel’s philosophy. That, after Kant, we can no longer aspire to a directly objective view of the world, and God, is something that Hegel takes for granted. The point is not to stop at this reflective standpoint and not to conclude, with Kant, that because our view of the world is inevitably perspectival, there cannot be (objective) knowledge that is not derived from (empirical) experience and that we should therefore resign ourselves to a world of appearances. Traditional metaphysics grounded objectivity on the subject conforming to the object; Kant jeopardized this account and advanced an idea of universal subjectivity that required the unification of subject and object in the subject, but in so doing, he still maintained the traditional (Cartesian) conception of subject and object as originally distinct and in mutual opposition. If, however, subject and object were not in original opposition and the task of reason was to retrieve and consciously realize the unification of subject and object, then we could aspire not to a direct objectivity but rather to a mediated objectivity, that is, an objectivity that is the result of a reason whose task is to retrieve and consciously realize the unification of subject and object.

Self-consciousness does not passively receive the content of cognition—which constitutes its objectivity—from a pre-existing mind-independent external reality. If consciousness ‘restricts itself to the scope of perception’, then no objectivity can be reached. It is rather in ‘the content of thought in and for itself’ (‘der Inhalt des Gedankens für sich’, E I: 92/8: 125)Footnote ¹¹ that objectivity can be reached, that is, by embracing a conception of (metaphysical) reality as the result of an ongoing process of mediation between subject and object that is always already in place. Figuratively speaking—which, as we will see in the next section, is not inappropriate in this context—we might say that our gaze is always already part of reality and that reality is such because it includes our gaze.

Kant’s modesty is the path to Hegel’s ambition. If, on the one hand, by ‘transcendental’ we mean that our cognition is always perspectival, then Hegel’s idealism is still transcendental and is even more transcendental that Kant’s idealism because, for Hegel, all our attempts to keep our consciousness distinct from the world, and the world distinct from our consciousness, in the process of cognition are destined to fail. If, on the other hand, by ‘transcendental’ we mean a philosophy concerned exclusively with the conditions and forms of our knowledge, then Hegel’s idealism is not transcendental, because he wants to restore content to non-sensible (metaphysical) knowledge. That content, however, is not independent of human activity because, being ‘content of thought’, it inevitably includes (to the point of being indistinguishable from) a historical and representational dimension. Beyond any debate about the use of the term ‘transcendental’, if the reconstruction above is valid, then Hegel is a post-Kantian philosopher with a post-critical metaphysics.

So far, I have sketched an account of Hegel’s metaphysics as concerned with a reality that, precisely because it is metaphysical, is the result of an ongoing process of mediation between subject and object which is always already in place, and as therefore aiming at giving an account of metaphysical objects conceived as the products of this indissoluble relation between self-consciousness and the world.

The view suggested here differs from its competitors in a twofold sense. This view does not read Hegel’s idealism as an inquiry into fundamental ‘features’ or ‘structures’ of the world aiming at reaching a type of ‘scientific’ or ‘naturalistic’ knowledge of the way the world is ‘anyway’.Footnote ¹² At the same time, my view avoids any anthropological or subjectivist drift of the post-Kantian revisionist interpretation, which might lead to an account in which the possibility of a post-critical metaphysics is drastically reduced—or even impossible—and there is no other function of God beyond that of being a philosophical metaphor or, at best, a figural representation of the source of norms. Conversely, the view I am advocating safeguards the presence of an unavoidable metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s thought, which is conceived to be an expression of Hegel’s mediated objectivity, consistent with the principle of the indissolubility of the relation between self-consciousness and the world.

The mediated objectivity of metaphysical knowledge is an important qualification of the post-Kantian interpretation. This qualification, in fact, allows the post-Kantian interpreter to defend a post-critical metaphysics and, equally important for our purpose, to provide a philosophical justification of Hegel’s religious unfoundational discourse: the conception of God entails a mediately objective, not merely metaphorical, understanding of religious representations.

From this point of view, the question of the reality of God as presented before, which seems to push the interpreter of Hegel to choose between an anthropological and a realist (theological) reading of Hegel, is misleading, as it is presented in pre-critical, pre-Kantian, terms. Presenting the alternative as lying between an anthropological and a realist reading means conceiving of God in a pre-critical way, that is, as an entity absolutely transcendent and separated from humans, whose properties can be discussed regardless of how God is thought of. In Hegel’s view, Kant was right in emphasising the practical relevance of the idea of God for us, but was wrong in maintaining that any (theoretical) knowledge of God was therefore inaccessible. Hegel regards Christianity as the ‘consummate religion’ precisely because of the centrality of the incarnation, which is, conceptually, the unity between the finite and the infinite, a unity realized religiously in the incarnation, and which reason is called upon to realize at a conceptual level. On this ground, to wonder whether the events of the Christian narrative—the incarnation, the death of God, and the resurrection of Christ—occur only ‘for us’ or in ‘external’ reality is a pre-critical question. This is because, in the spirit of Kant’s critical revolution—or, better, in the spirit of what Hegel considers to be Kant’s critical revolution—we cannot ‘step out’ of our finite perspective on the world and God to have a directly objective reading of the world.

Embracing a mediately objective reading of religious representations means that we should conceive of those Vorstellungen neither as inadequately objective representations of the structures of reality, later destined to be overcome by adequately objective philosophical conceptualisations of the same structures, nor as mere metaphors for the rational structures of the whole in which we live. Thus, the next question is how the conception of mediated objectivity can be applied to religious representations. If the Christian doctrines are the results of historical elaboration and transformation—and Hegel is certainly aware of this fact—it should be explained how their historically determined nature can be reconciled with Hegel’s ambition to rescue them from subjectivism and restore content to religion.

III. Literal, metaphorical and figural reading

In the previous section, I sketched a qualified post-Kantian reading that, thanks to the introduction of the notion of mediated objectivity, is consistent with the possibility of a post-critical metaphysics while allowing for an account of Hegel’s thought that is not de-theologized. The conception of objectivity as mediated objectivity, I argued, philosophically justifies Hegel’s unfoundational religious discourse because it implies that the human subject cannot properly think of God outside of the set of historical and cultural categories that have determined His representation. One of the benefits of this reading is, I now contend, an approach to religious representations that avoids the (supposedly) mutually exclusive choice between their literal and their metaphorical meaning, a distinction that derives from the endorsement of a realist or an anthropological interpretation, respectively. Such a neat distinction is commonly accepted today, but this has not always been the case.

In the mid-twentieth century, some philologists and literary critics addressed this issue, especially although not exclusively in relation to the interpretation of medieval literary works, most prominently Dante’s Commedia. These scholars developed interpretive approaches that, although having their own respective specificities, had a few important elements in common: Auerbach’s figural hermeneutics (Reference Auerbach1984), Singleton’s allegorical theory of interpretation (Reference Singleton1954), and Charity’s typological exegesis (Reference Charity1966). In slightly different ways, they all contended that besides the literal and the allegorical readings, there is at least one third type of reading, which has been almost completely abandoned in modernity but which was quite prominent in the Middle Ages. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer collectively to the ways in which this third type of reading has been described as the ‘figural reading’.

Most of the medieval texts were concerned with or made important references to the Christian Bible. This obviously posed the problem for medieval authors of determining the extent to which some events narrated in the Bible had to be taken literally. The early Christian theologian Origen, as well as others of the so-called Alexandrian school, claimed that the Bible’s true meaning could be found only by reading it allegorically.Footnote ¹³ In most cases, this reading was justified by the attempt to read stories in the Old Testament as anticipations of Christ’s coming: thus, for example, the three days Jonah spent in the great fish symbolize the three days before Christ’s resurrection (something already suggested in the Gospel according to Matthew: 12: 39–40).

However influential, Origen’s allegorical interpretation, which is the interpretation most familiar to us, was not the most prominent in the Middle Ages. In fact, ‘the medieval exegetical tradition inherited primarily Tertullian’s historical method which promoted figural interpretation’ (De Benedictis Reference De Benedictis2010: 14; cf. Auerbach Reference Auerbach1984: 36). With the term figura, Auerbach defined an account of reality whereby one historical figure or event signifies a second one. He argues that figural readers, unlike allegorical readers such as Origen, preserved the historicity of biblical figures. As Auerbach explains, ‘Since in figural interpretation one thing stands for another, since one thing represents and signifies the other, figural interpretation is “allegorical” in the widest sense. But it differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies’ (Auerbach Reference Auerbach1984: 54).Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, the two characters or events—the first one, and the second one that is signified by the first—remain distinct, and the meaning is to be identified in the figural relation between them. This ‘figural realism’, as Auerbach calls it (Reference Auerbach2003: 196), was dominant in the Middle Ages: it is ‘the idea that earthly life is thoroughly real, with the reality of the flesh into which the Logos entered, but that with all its reality it is only umbra and figura of the authentic, future, ultimate truth, the real reality that will unveil and preserve the figura’ (Auerbach Reference Auerbach1984: 72). In Auerbach’s view, Dante’s Commedia is the paradigmatic instance of figural realism. ‘For Dante’, he explains, ‘the literal meaning or historical reality of a figure stands in no contradiction to its profounder meaning, but precisely “figures” it; the historical reality is not annulled, but confirmed and fulfilled by the deeper meaning’ (73). ‘Is the terrena Jerusalem’, he concludes, ‘without historical reality because it is a figura aeternae Jerusalem?’ (74).

Singleton’s allegorical theory of interpretation makes a similar point. Singleton appeals to the distinction, which was quite widespread in the Middle Ages, between the ‘allegory of poets’ and the ‘allegory of theologians’. The former, substantially analogous to Auerbach’s ‘allegory’, is the allegory of ‘this for that’; the latter, which corresponds to Auerbach’s figura, is the allegory of ‘this and that, of this sense plus that sense’. Singleton explains: ‘Its first meaning is meaning in verbis; its other meaning is a meaning in facto, in the event itself. Words have a real meaning in pointing to a real event; the event in its turn has meaning because events wrought by God are themselves as words yielding a meaning, a higher and spiritual sense’ (Reference Singleton1954: 89–90).

As Auerbach remarks, ‘The strangeness of the medieval view of reality has prevented modern scholars from distinguishing between figuration and allegory and led them for the most part to perceive only the latter’ (Reference Auerbach1984: 74). To Auerbach’s conclusion, another more strictly philosophical point can be added. The figural reading appears ‘strange’ to modern scholars mainly because they are unfamiliar with it; and this unfamiliarity is determined, in turn, by the affirmation of a philosophical conception that arose precisely in the late Middle Ages, that is, nominalism. Nominalism was one of the two main philosophical tenets in the so-called ‘dispute of the universals’. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus argued that universals—what is predicated of multiple entities, according to a definition inherited from Aristotle—are real, that is, they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them. Against this realism nominalists generally asserted that only individuals or particulars exist and denied that universals are real. William of Ockham, probably the most influential nominalist, distinguished himself from the other thinkers of the same stream because he argued that there is something in common among similar particulars. However, he argued that universals are not real and do not exist independently of the mind but only as mental contents: universals are only mental ways of referring to sets of particulars. A universal, Ockham states, ‘is nothing other than a content of the mind’ (Reference Ockham1964: 36–37), and a real science ‘is not about things, but about mental contents standing for things’ (12–13).Footnote ¹⁵ The distinction between ‘things’ and ‘mental contents’ was destined to be one of the milestones of modern philosophy. One might think here of Descartes’s theory of ideas and its reception and transformation in the tradition of British empiricism. This distinction, substantially alien to medieval realism—which was the dominant view until the late Middle Ages—fits better with the allegorical reading (‘this for that’) than with the figural reading (‘this and that’).

Interestingly, Auerbach claims that the figural realism that he theorizes in his masterwork Mimesis ‘arose from the themes and methods of German intellectual history and philology; it would be conceivable in no other tradition than in that of German romanticism and Hegel’ (Auerbach Reference Auerbach2003: 571). And elsewhere he explicitly says that his figural conception ‘is already to be found in Hegel’ (Auerbach Reference Auerbach1984: 71). Here I am not interested in scrutinizing Hegel’s influence on Auerbach. It is much more interesting, for the purposes of this paper, to explore whether a conception similar to Auerbach’s figural realism is at work in Hegel’s treatment of religion. If we find enough evidence to support this reading, we will find ourselves equipped with a conceptual tool that would allow us to avoid both the realist and the fictionalist interpretations of religious representations in Hegel’s philosophy and to clarify Hegel’s application of mediated objectivity to them.

Hegel addresses the issue of the status of religious representations in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The content of the certainty of God (the objectivity of religion), Hegel claims, is first given to us in the form of representation—‘a consciousness of something that one has before oneself as something objective’ (Gegenständliches) (Rel I: 396/292). However, Hegel argues, representation (Vorstellung) has two forms. The first form of representation occurs by way of the image (Bild). Images have a double meaning: the immediate meaning primitively expressed by the image, and then ‘what is meant by it, its inner meaning’ (Rel I: 397/293). Thus, Hegel’s account of the first form of the religious mode of representation does not particularly differ from Kant’s: religious doctrines, notions and stories appear to be metaphorical, allegorical or symbolic expressions of an ‘inner meaning’ that is attributed to them (see Redding Reference Redding2011: 226). Hegel does not distinguish between metaphor, allegory and symbol (see Hodgson Reference Hodgson2005: 113).Footnote ¹⁶ Rather, he is interested, as Redding remarks, in stressing that ‘the distinction between the literal and the figurative is one made within the mode of representation’Footnote ¹⁷ (rather than between representation and thought). That said, the account provided by Hegel so far seems to support a metaphorical or even fictional reading of religious propositions. In an oft-quoted passage of this section of the Lectures, Hegel proclaims that ‘For example, if we say that God has begotten a son, we know quite well that this is only an image […] [it] is supposed to signify a different relationship, which is something like this one’ (Rel I: 397/293). He also mentions other examples, such as ‘God’s wrath’ and the ‘tree of knowledge’ of Genesis. A religious representation of this type ‘is not to be taken in the literal sense’ and ‘is merely an analogy, a simile, an image’ (Rel I: 398/293).

However, taking these claims as evidence of a fictional approach to religion would be a gross error. The Church Fathers would not say anything different. Origen, the champion of the allegorical reading, offers plenty of examples along the same lines, and even Tertullian, who pioneered the figural reading, does not apply it indistinctively: some biblical contents, such as the tree of knowledge, are merely allegorical, whereas others are figural. Hegel seems to make a similar distinction when he introduces the second form of representation by saying: ‘However, it is not merely things that are manifestly metaphorical (bildlich)Footnote ¹⁸ that belong to the mode of representation in its sensible aspect but also things that are to be taken as historical [Geschichtliches]’ (Rel I: 399/294). Hegel refers here to the story of Jesus, a story that ‘does not merely count as a myth, in the mode of images [Bilder]’ but as ‘something completely historical’. Its historical dimension is twofold: it is an ‘outward history’, i.e., the ‘ordinary story of a human being’, and, at the same time, an ‘inward history’, which is the genuine, substantial dimension of this history, ‘a divine happening, a divine deed, an absolutely divine action’. Hegel concludes that ‘this is just what is the object of reason [Gegenstand der Vernunft]’ (Rel I: 399/294). This is a very clarifying claim in the context of our investigation. The story of Jesus is depicted as not simply an allegory but as having a twofold value: first, it has value as a historical event (the life of Jesus, a specific human being living in a specific place in a specific time); and second, it has value for what it figures, that is, as ‘divine history’.Footnote ¹⁹ The first form of representation is the allegory of ‘this for that’; the second form is the allegory of ‘this and that’ or figura.

If one considers the passage that we have just examined, it is puzzling how someone might have considered the Hegelian religion to be ‘disfiguring’ the truth or, at best, as giving a very inadequate, because representational, account of truth.Footnote ²⁰ Conversely, as Houlgate argues, religious representations ‘are appropriate—and, indeed, necessary—ways of picturing the truth’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2004: 99). However, truth here, I suggest, is not the truth of the old metaphysics of the ‘God’s-eye view’ but rather the ‘mediated objectivity’ that results from the ongoing process of mediation between subject and object, which is always already in place. Thus, the meaning of a religious representation is to be identified neither merely in the historical nature of that represented character or event, nor merely in the spiritual meaning that that represented character or event is meant to signify, but rather in the figural relation between this historical nature and spiritual meaning. In other words, a figural relation is meant to capture the organic unity of outward (objective) history and inward (subjective) history.Footnote ²¹

Picture-thinking (das vorstellende Denken) as an activity is not distinctive of religion: at a certain cognitive level—say, the level of our everyday experience—everything is, to some extent, experienced as a mere representation first. In the context of religion, however, some representations are not merely images but are also expressions of what Hegel calls the ‘divine history’: these representations deserve a figural reading. My argument here is that Hegel appropriates this type of reading because he sees it as the most appropriate way to reach what I called ‘mediated objectivity’, that is, an objectivity that reflects the relational unity between subject and object.

A closer inspection of the language used can be of some help here. As Nuzzo reminds us, Tertullian’s Latin term ‘figura’ was rendered in German by Luther using ‘Gestalt’, in the context of his critique of Zwingli’s allegorical interpretation of the Holy Communion to restate the real presence of Christ’s body in the bread. Nuzzo maintains that the reality of Gestalt—as the German rendering of figura—‘is not lost in the abstraction of allegory or symbolism’ (Nuzzo Reference Nuzzo2012: 25).Footnote ²² This is an important observation. The notion of Gestalt has, for Hegel, a very specific meaning. Objects that have a Gestalt ‘are thought of as organic unities, appreciable only as a whole, not by the piecemeal consideration of their parts’ (Inwood Reference Inwood1992: 108). A rose, Mozart’s Requiem, or ancient Greek culture are all examples of objects that have a Gestalt. Some religious representations are simply metaphorical images (Bilder), but others have a Gestalt because in them, to quote Nuzzo again, history is not ‘eliminated’ but rather ‘repeated’ (Nuzzo Reference Nuzzo2012: 39). These are the religious representations that properly constitute a religion. In the Phenomenology, Hegel uses the term Gestalt for the shapes of consciousness in general, but religion is that particular Gestalt in which Spirit is fully self-conscious (PG: 414/3: 499). What Hegel is saying here is that human spirit cannot become fully conscious of itself without knowing the divine spirit (see also Lauer Reference Lauer1982: 188).Footnote ²³ But the divine spirit cannot be properly known by abstracting the conceptual from the sensible, because it is given to us in religious representations that are figurae or Gestalten, that is, organic unities of the sensible and the conceptual, the historical and the eternal, the finite and the infinite, the subject and the object. In fact, the overcoming of the distinction between things and mental contents that emerges from a figural reading of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is not a regression to pre-Kantian, ‘anti-nominalist’, or even realist positions, but quite the opposite. A religious Gestalt is the evidence that metaphysical reality is the result of an ongoing process of mediation between subject and object. To some extent, a religious Gestalt is the result of our geistlich activity, but at the same time, our identity is also constituted by the religious Gestalten that populate our cultural world.

Therefore, when Hegel talks about those religious representations that are not merely images but Gestalten, we should interpret them neither literally nor metaphorically but rather figuratively. To treat a religious representation as figura means, to paraphrase Auerbach (Reference Auerbach1984: 72), that the individual earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, but rather as in immediate connection with a divine order. However, for Hegel, the divine order needs individual earthly events to fully realize itself.

IV. Figural reading of religious representations

In the 1824 Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel claims that ‘[God] has no other figure or shape [Gestalt] than that of the sensible mode of the spirit that is spirit in itself—the shape of the singular human being. This is the one and only sensible shape of spirit—it is the appearance of God in the flesh. This is the monstrous reality [das Ungeheure] whose necessity we have seen. What it posits is that divine and human nature are not intrinsically different—God [is] in human shape’ (Rel III: 214/146). Indeed, Christ is for Hegel the religious Gestalt par excellence: spirituality, conceived as the expression of Geist, is ‘ultimately a matter of the impact of the historical Jesus on historical human beings’ (Dowson Reference Dowson2001: 83).

We find an extensive clarification of this dynamic in the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, a consideration of which allows us to appreciate how, in Hegel’s view, religious Gestalten should be interpreted neither literally nor metaphorically but rather, to use the term that I introduced in the previous section to capture this interpretative relation, figuratively. There is a ‘see-saw’, Hegel argues, in our relationship with Christ. On the one hand, we have an ‘imaginative consciousness’ of Christ, conceived as an object outside us and separated from us, that is, as a historical personage who lived in Palestine two millennia ago. On the other hand, worship and the cult express and indeed provide a ‘sense of unity with this object’ (GP: 134/180). Focusing exclusively on the imaginative consciousness, Hegel adds, equals ‘lying against the spirit’, that is, ‘saying that the spirit is not universal, not holy, i.e. that Christ is only something apart, separated from us, only one person differing from another, only someone who once existed in Judaea, or who yet exists still but beyond, in Heaven, God knows where, not actually present in his community’ (GP: 135/181). A few pages later, Hegel draws the consequences of this line of reasoning: ‘Man and God, the subjective Idea and the objective Idea are one here. This is the Germanic principle, this unification of subject and object’ (GP: 179/246). Then Hegel concludes that ‘the unity of knowing and truth is not an immediate unity but a process; it is the process of the spirit’ (GP: 179/246).Footnote ²⁴ For once, Hegel could not be clearer than this. It is through the ‘process of the spirit’ that the mediated unity that constitutes objectivity can be achieved and content restored to both philosophy and religion.

Further evidence to support this reading can be found in the third part of the Encyclopaedia, where Hegel remarks that to elucidate the ‘unity of form and content present in mind, the unity of manifestation and what is manifested, we can refer to the teaching of the Christian religion’ (E III: 17/10: 28). Here, Hegel mentions once again the Christian doctrine according to which God ‘has begotten a son’. As we have already seen, taken in isolation, this is only an image (Bild) that allegorically signifies that Christ is the organ of God’s revelation. However, if we consider Christ as a Gestalt, that is, in its organic unity with the concept of God and with the sensible world (we might also say, using the terminology adopted so far, if we interpret Christ not simply allegorically but figuratively), then we realize that ‘the Son is not the mere organ of the revelation but is himself the content of the revelation’, and the content is that God made ‘a distinction within himself’, made ‘himself finite’ (E III: 17/10: 29). A figural reading of Christ as Gestalt can be taken as expressing a conceptual content (while fully preserving the historical Jesus and his religious value), namely, that ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ should not be conceived as mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, that ‘Objectivity’s “self-emptying” is a condition of its appearing for subjectivity; and subjectivity’s “self-emptying” is a condition for it genuinely attending to the objectivity of objects’ (Adams Reference Adams2013: 3).

As Hegel claims, ‘what is speculative is not separate from religious ideas’ (GP: 134/180). The unity of divine and human, which is ‘reconciliation’ (Versöhnung) in the language of religious representations, and which Kant only postulated, becomes objective for Hegel. But its objectivity is mediated, that is, achieved through a learning process, the process of spirit. That unity, already figuratively realized by Christ, must be ‘appropriated’ (zu eigen gemacht) by us (Rel I: 154/65).Footnote ²⁵

The fact that such a figural reading is possible can elucidate the philosophical claims put forward by Hegel, insofar as it clarifies the idealist overcoming of the opposition between subject and object. Subject and object should be thought of not in isolation but as both contributing to (metaphysical) reality: thus, for example, the truth of a religious representation is to be found neither in its literal (historical) meaning nor in an (inevitably subjective) mere metaphorical meaning, but rather in the relation between them.

The figural hermeneutics developed by Auerbach might in itself be simply considered to be an isomorphic model of Hegel’s dialectical self-negation: for any spiritual content to be real, it has to become manifest, be expressed, and ultimately be articulated at the level of finitude or otherness. What I am suggesting here is that the general interpretative approach to religious representations that Auerbach and others had the merit of formalising—i.e., an approach that focuses on the relation between the subject and the object of interpretation rather than exclusively on the objective (literal reading) or subjective (metaphorical reading) pole of the relation—is more than an isomorphic model. It is, I contend, the expression of an idealist metaphysics that conceives the entirety of non-empirical reality—the cultural world, we might say—as being the result of an ongoing relation between subject and object. In other words, we cannot escape that figural system because we, as human agents, are inevitably part of it.

This is the reason why a figural interpretation is so central to Hegel, i.e., because an interpretation that focuses on the relation between subject and object—that is, one that aims at a mediated objectivity—is the only proper way to ‘read’ the metaphysical reality while avoiding both a pre-critical objectivism, which is constantly exposed to the Kantian critique, and a subjectivism that waives the content of religion, as happens with Romanticism. In Hegel’s view, in fact, (post-critical) metaphysics needs to be dialectical, that is, it must take into account the historical development of self-consciousness—in Hegel’s jargon, the life of the spirit. Insofar as Christian doctrines such as the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ are part of such development, a figural interpretation of them is functional for the establishment of a post-critical metaphysics.

For Hegel, God becomes actual only in the thought of human agents—subjective spirits—as a result of human interaction, especially in the recognitive practice of reconciliation that characterizes the religious community (cf. Redding and Bubbio Reference Redding and Bubbio2014: 482). God’s self-actualisation is not independent of that which determines our relation to God, such as historical, social and cultural dimensions, but these dimensions actually shape God’s self-actualisation. There is, therefore, a sense in which Hegel’s God differs from the merely philosophical God of the pre-Kantian metaphysical tradition, insofar as, for Hegel, God cannot be completely abstracted from those religious Vorstellungen that represent His relationship with the human subjects. Any attempt to think of God independent of those historical, social, and cultural dimensions, as in the traditional pre-Kantian metaphysics, would constitute a regression to the abstract conception of God as substance and is ultimately destined to fail.

The figural reading has proved to be a better alternative to both the realist and the fictionalist interpretations of religious representations in Hegel’s philosophy of religion and has allowed for a clarification of Hegel’s application of mediated objectivity to them. In the final section, I will consider the question of whether the figural reading can also be applied to the concept of God itself and whether God is one representation—in the sense of Gestalt, or figura, as we can now concede—among others or whether there is something distinctive about it.

V. God: concept and Idea

As Hegel explains in the Encyclopaedia, to have a representation (Vorstellung) of an object does not necessarily mean to be ‘familiar with the meaning’ that this representation has ‘for thinking’, that is, with its concept (Begriff) (E I: 30–31/8: 44). We can therefore have a representation of God without being familiar with the concept of God. In this sense, the concept of God is ‘the result of the other branches [of philosophy]’, but in the philosophy of religion, ‘this end is made the beginning’. Hegel explains: ‘That God (as result) appears is what we make into our particular object—God as the utterly concrete idea [Idee] together with its infinite appearance, which is identical with the substance, with the essence of reality; this is the content, the specification of the content’ (Rel I: 120/37). The Idea of GodFootnote ²⁶ is the full actualisation of the concept of God realized through a dynamic overcoming of the opposition between subject and object (see also Magee 2010: 112). Philosophy ‘does not thereby place itself above religion but only above the form of faith as representation’ (Rel III: 289/374); ‘It still relies on religion for content’ (Buterin 2011: 810–11). In summary, God might well be regarded merely as a representation in our everyday use of the term, but this does not prevent God from being considered as concept. Moreover, the fact that this conception is the result of philosophy does not mean that philosophy can now do without religion: it is religion, in fact, that provides the conception of God with the content that is required for its full actualisation in the Idea (Idee).

Hegel is explicit in calling God ‘an idealization’ (das Ideelle), but he also remarks that to call God ‘only an idealization, presupposes the standpoint according to which finite existence counts as the real, and idealization or the being-for-one has only a one-sided meaning’ (L I: 129/5: 177; my italics). In other words, any crude anthropological reading of God, such as that of Feuerbach, is a regression into pre-Kantian metaphysical realism, insofar as, although it identifies God as a ‘mere’ projection, it regards the ‘human being’ as a metaphysical entity that is there ‘anyway’, independent of any act of human recognition.

How can we go beyond the ‘one-sided meaning’ of the concept of God? In which sense is God ‘more’ than an idealisation? So far, we have distinguished between the image (Bild) of God, the concept (Begriff) of God, and the idea (Idee) of God. These distinctions do not in any way reproduce Kantian dualism at a metaphysical level, with an allegedly phenomenal ‘concept of God’—God as it can be known by us—and a ‘noumenal’ unreachable God—which remains beyond our rational abilities. Hegel consistently opposes any dualism of this type. The concept of God, as ‘object of reason’, is the outcome of the ‘other branches of philosophy’, as Hegel reminds us. However, we need the philosophy of religion to turn that end into the beginning of the dynamic that overcomes the opposition between subject and object, which can eventually restore full content to that concept, namely, the process that will lead to the Idea of God. The process of full actualisation of the concept of God requires the resources of both religion and philosophy.

Now, consider what religion and philosophy contribute to the actualisation of the concept of God as Idea. These remarks are meant to clarify the extent to which ‘the Idea of God’ is God. Religion is always driven, for Hegel, by a tension towards the full actualisation of the concept of God, which implies and indeed coincides with the unity between the human and the divine. If Christianity is regarded as the ‘consummate religion’, this is because, in Hegel’s view, Christianity realizes that the concept of God needs a concrete (historical and bodily) actualisation. The various versions of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion can be read as presenting an increasing emphasis on the arguments for the necessity of the incarnation. In the last series of Lectures, delivered in 1831, Hegel maintains that individual human subjectivity is the only proper Gestalt in which God can appear (Rel III: 214/146; and see Hodgson Reference Hodgson2005: 52). This explains the figural necessity of the incarnation of Christ. Moreover, the religious (representational) reality of the incarnation of Christ is confirmed and fulfilled by a deeper meaning, that is, ‘the true idea of God’, which ‘entails that God is not a beyond, over and against which stands consciousness’ (VPW: 188/87). When I think of God, I think of this conceptual object (God) figuratively: I might well refer to the Christian God but, Hegel maintains, the incarnated Christian God is a Gestalt, that is, it is to be thought of in its organic unity with the concept of God.

This is where religion is to be complemented by philosophy. As object of reason, the conception of God is the result of the other branches of philosophy: as such, it might be considered to be a figurative representation of a philosophical content (the source of norms). However, this is only half of the story because when I think of God, even the subject of this action (the ‘I’) is to be considered figuratively. In everyday usage, when I say ‘I’, I usually refer to a representation of my thoughts, perceptions, desires and body as an individualized unity. But, Hegel argues, the true objective self is this representation made consistent with its content, that is, self-consciousness. Self-consciousness does not exist in isolation.Footnote ²⁷ Being a product of reason, it requires others to recognize it to exist as self-consciousness and to collectively make identity-conferring commitments to idealities such as norms.

Therefore, the process of the actualisation of the concept into the Idea of God is both religious and philosophical. On the one hand, (Christian) religion, with its representations, Gestalten, and cult, makes the incarnated God ‘actually present’ in the community (GP: 135/181). It is the identity-conferring commitment of the community that makes God actually ‘present’ (the Hegelian version of the Gospel’s claim, ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them’, Matthew 18: 20). Thus, it can be said that God is not fully actual outside of the human community and its recognitive activity. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to deduce from the previous point that the concept of God plays a merely social function in Hegel’s account, because the actualisation of the concept into the Idea is also philosophical. If the concept of God, as the source of norms, unifies the realm of reason as a whole and if the self is an object of reason, it follows that the development of self-consciousness implies the consciousness of the interdependence between the self and God. It is in this process that the concept of God is fully actualized in the idea of God. The content of the concept of God requires that it be understood to exist in a way that goes beyond the true point that, like any concept, it exists only insofar as it belongs to the realm of reason: for God to be seriously considered as the source of norms, we have to think of Him as necessarily existing. It is qua source of norms that God ‘announces its real actuality’, according to Hegel’s definition (SL: 482/6: 208) with which I started this paper.

In light of these considerations, to what extent it is possible to distinguish ‘God’ from ‘the Idea of God’? This distinction can and cannot be made, depending on the angle from which we consider the question. If, on the one hand, we take ‘God’ to mean a (super-)natural entity that can be known and/or with which it is possible to establish a connection by-passing our rational faculties—that is, the conception of God grounded in feeling rather than rational thought, advanced by thinkers such as Jacobi, Fries and Schleiermacher—then the distinction between ‘God’ and the ‘Idea of God’ is evident. For Hegel, conceiving God in a direct and unconceptualized way is simply impossible, and pursuing that path inevitably leads to subjectivism, which is precisely what Hegel is trying to avoid. If, on the other hand, we follow Hegel in his conception of God as ‘not a beyond’ but as necessarily intertwined with the human self through the recognitive activity of the community and as a commitment that one necessarily undertakes when thinking of norms, then ‘the Idea of God’ is God in its full (idealistic and mediated) objectivity, and we no longer need such a distinction.

To conclude, a proper, figural approach to Christian religion leads to the idealistic, mediated objectivity of the concept of God—that is, to its understanding as Idea—but it is philosophy that can and should provide a justification for this objectivity and show that the Idea of God necessarily involves God’s existence. Indeed, this is what Hegel appears to be offering us with his defence of the ontological argument for the existence of God; further research on Hegel’s use of the ontological argument would, I suggest, confirm the thesis advanced in this paper.²⁸